Shiv Singh recently posted some Reflections on the Nature of Collaboration over at the app gap. He says:
An often forgotten fact about collaboration is that the people who typically want to collaborate are also the ones who trust each other the most. They are also the people who recognize that they can benefit in some manner by collaborating. Those benefits usually extend beyond just learning from one another to also recognizing that their reputations get enhanced as more peers observe their ongoing collaborations. But these people aren’t always in the majority.
Shiv concentrates on the implications of this for "Enterprise 2.0 software" but it reminded me of the often unspoken political problems when "intercultural communication problems" are identified in a business. Every now and then, two offices are not co-operating well on a project, but the problem is not at the level of the cultural differences in ways of working and communicating, or generating trust across two groups who perceive strong differences between them.
Instead, the problem comes out of a company's structure, which may place parts of those two offices in competition for certain customers, or particular bits of work. Or the director of one of the offices doesn't want the project to succeed because the director of the other office would get all the credit (and the coming promotion!)
Business problems can have many roots and it may not be the one you expect. This is why it is so important to begin with an analysis of the business and the context of the perceived problem. When you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. That's why I feel my experience in other fields has helped in cross-cultural consulting. It helps me be open about what the root causes may be and allows me to step back and say "This problem is really about the way you force these offices to compete against each other over business. If you don't address that, co-operation between them will not improve, no matter how many "cultural awareness" workshops are put on.
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